Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Here is a list of new business ideas that I am compiling.
1. Online document printing service business idea for India: You email them the documents, they will take a print of it and send it to its destination by traditional mail.
2. Portable toilets with attenders: Portable toilets with 5 star facilities and attenders for cleaning.
3. Portable kitchen on wheals: You can rent it out to catering companies who can use it for outdoor parties. Will have all amenities required for a commercial kitchen.
4. Generate electricity using human excreta or night soil waste: Make toilets around slums and give free access to toilets. Use a bio-gas plant to generate gas and use gas to run generator for electricity.
5. Overnight stay Dormitory chain business idea: In India, hotels are expensive for the poor person. You can build cheap dormitories and charge very less money.
6. Small warehouse business idea: Small shopkeepers don't have money to hire storage space or warehouse space, you can provide space at a very low rate.
7. Locker business idea for India: There are lockers to keep your valuable in banks but are very expensive. There are small companies offering locker service but they cant grow their business as the common man finds its unaffordable. You can offer a cheap service of lockers.
8. Vehicle that works of compressed air which is compressed using solar energy: Sterling engine.
9. Instant dal rice:
10. News / events timeline website:
11. Facebook for the dead website idea:
12. Mall type picnic spot with temples business idea:
13. Hand operated fan business idea:
14. Hand operated mixer business idea:

Entrepreneur India is a Magazine for Aspiring Businessmen. It targets the english speaking educated businessmen with some money to spend. Its costs Rs 100 and is available on news stands all over India. It has some good business ideas. Overall, I feel that they could improve on their writing skills. Well they are targeting the impatient person who just wants to get a new business idea and run it through his friends.

25th Sept 2009, Lagos, Nigeria. A major player in the Indian mobile communication industry is reported to be in talks with a call center operator based in Nigeria. The plan is to outsource domestic calls generated in India to the call center in Abuja. Sam Obayojie the CEO of Capital Talk Systems, with offices in Lagos and Abuja, said, "We will give good training to our staff and inform them about India culture", in his broken English.

Capital Talk Systems plans to hire about 200 locals and train them to speak in fluent English and basics of Indian culture to help them effectively interact with Indian customers. To prevent a cultural shock for Indian's dialing the mobile companies call center, the Nigerian staff would be given Indian names and would say they are based in Mumbai and also mention they had "vada pav" for breakfast, a popular snack in Mumbai. Initially only customers who have opted of English as the language on the interactive voice response system (IVRS) would be transfer to the call center in Abuja.

With this move, the mobile company plans to save an estimated Rs 2 crore in call center operations currently situated in the expensive Indian city of Mumbai, where call center executives fluent in English command higher than average salaries and switch jobs every six months.

Repeated phone calls and emails to the mobile company's top executives remained unanswered. The PR company handling the mobile companies accounts refused to comment as they had no information about this deal. One executive when contacted commented, "yes, we are in talks with them", but refused to give any additional information about the deal, and declined to be quoted as he was not authorized to speak with the press.

Mr TVSSRCV Rao, president of Call Center Owners and Operators Association of India expressed is disbelief and displeasure when told about the move. He said more such deals would adversely affect the call center industry in India and said that his association would lobby with the government to ban such deals happening in the future. He feared that such deals will lead to large scale unemployment among English speaking teenagers entering the job market and would discourage students in school to learn English. He said that Nigerians would not be able to understand an Indians' English accent and Indians' would have problems understanding African accents. He said that there were a lot of cultural differences in India and Africa to make this work. When told that Indian call centers were doing good with business with US companies, which has a totally different culture than India, he said in an annoyed voice, Africans would take time to learn the Indian culture.

Shares of both the companies jumped upon hearing the news. Shares of the Lagos based company jumped by 5% in the Nairobi stock exchange and shares of the mobile company jumped 6% in BSE interday trading after rumors of the deal spread in the morning.

Analyst expect Africa to be Worlds next China and expect more such deals in the future. Another analyst of a leading stock broking firm following the mobile company said that he expects Indians dialing the call center to encounter the same frustrations US citizens encountered when they dialed the local numbers only to be transfer to an Indian call center. He said, it would take some time for the call centers to stream line their operations and reduce error rates.

(Oruoghor Alen from Lagos office, Deepak Roysharma and Rema Singh from our Chennai office also contributed to this story.)

At the age of 60 GS Kumar is a troubled man. He married off his son in a lavish wedding thinking the dowry he would bring would wipe out his financial woes. But to his utter dismay and anguish, he got only 75 percent of the dowry amount. Now Kumar is a broken man, he has to marry off his daughter and his married son is still struggling at the business he opened with the money he received as dowry. Kumar was planning to use part of his sons dowry to marry off his daughter.

But now a group of recover agents has come together to help people such as Kumar. These agents generally work for banks, recovering personal loans from small time business men by harassing their family members when the business men are at their shops or factories. They also recover defaulters cars when the car owner fails to make the monthly loan installment. These agents generally operate by retaining a sizeable percentage of the loan amount as their fee, thus making a huge profit.

Now, these recovery agents are offering their services to harried people like Kumar who is struggling to get his due dowry amount from his son’s in-laws. Though agents are not targeting the huge profits they earn by working with banks, they are looking at the sheer size of the marriage market. It is estimated that at least 2 million men get married in India ever year and almost 80 per cent of them take dowry. Often this dowry amount is paid in installments. Often in-laws resort to cruel mental and physical torture techniques to get the remaining amount. In-laws often extract extra cash by beating their daughter in laws. Even though dowry taking is banned by law, with deterrents such as imprisonment these cash transactions are rampant and add to the non taxable black money in India.

Recovery agents plan to cash on this market and estimate it to be a Rs 200 million market. Even though they are planning to charge less commission, the potential market is huge and offer opportunities for existing agents to open offices in all cities and towns of India.

PE firms like Royam Money is planning cash in on this trend and are planning to invest in this booming industry. Royam Money plans to acquire 20 % stake in Summan Recovery, a Mumbai based recovery firm with offices in 20 cities in India.